DBMS > GraphDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RDF4J

System Properties Comparison GraphDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RDF4J

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

Microsofts relational DBMS

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

RDF store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.27
Rank	#110	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	1015.30
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.50
Rank	#232	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Website

www.ontotext.com

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

rdf4j.org

Technical documentation

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

docs.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

rdf4j.org/documentation

Developer

Ontotext

Microsoft

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Initial release

2000

1989

2004

Current release

9.6, February 2021

SQL Server 2019, November 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

Named S4, Ontotext provides a semantic graph database based on GraphDB in the cloud.

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Java

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

yes

RDF Schemas

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

yes

APIs and other access methods

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Supported programming languages

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

GraphDB Enterprise is a high-performance semantic repository created by Ontotext....
» more

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked open data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

Key customers

BBC, Press Association, Financial Times, DK, Euromoney, The British Museum, Getty...
» more

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB-Free is free to use. SE and Enterprise are licensed per CPU-Core used. Perpetual...
» more

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